Of City Councils and Clerics

In his On the Square column this morning, Russel Saltzman recounts his experience as south ward alderman in a small town as he questions the role of clerics in public life:

But it might have pitted pastor against parishioners on an issue of some civic consequence, and that raises larger questions of a clerics role in public life. I am reminded of a time when the former presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Herbert Chilstrom, defended church lobbying and verdicts on political choices as the churchs reverent best guess on any given issue. These best guesses, reverent or not, always seemed to lean, and still do, toward a certain point on the political spectrum. Such a guess once included encouraging a boycott of a major oil company because it did some business with South Africa in the Apartheid years. I had parishioners who owned one of the stations being targeted. They read about it in the denominational magazine. They were not pleased.